If you've spent maybe five minutes on turntable.fm, you've heard the name DJ Wooooo. He is one of turntable's super users, and he shows it with the highly exclusive Daft Punk helmet avatar.

For those who have not heard of Wooooo, he is the top rated DJ on Turntable. With over 12,000 DJ points and upwards of 1,500 fans, DJ Wooooo has taken the turntable microcosm by storm. His room, DJ Wooooo's house/dance/electro, is constantly packed with the masses scrambling to get one of the coveted spots for some spin time.

His identity is shrouded in mystery. With little information available beyond his turntable name and an equally sparse Twitter and Facebook page, the cult of Wooooo has proliferated. Some have speculated that he is one of turntable's investors. Others have claimed that he's dating Sasha Grey.

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with DJ Wooooo, Ethan in real life, and discuss turntable.fm, music, Pandora, Spotify, and the cult of Wooooo.

JM: So, is it Wooooo or Ethan?

DJW: Uh, either or. For any article's purposes, it's typically Wooooo, but I don't mind that people know my first name at all.

JM: To start with the basics, how did you first come to find out about turntable?<

DJW: I believe I was You know how you had to be friends with someone who was in, kind of, the inner circles originally, and I don't know if it was I actually don't know who it was that connected me originally, but it was maybe a week into their beta launch. A friend sent me the link and I signed up, and I was able to jump on there. Originally, I was actually a little confused. I had no idea what was going on. And of course, no one else did either because it hadn't been out long enough and so, after jumping up and DJ-ing a few, you get that feeling of "Oh boy, this is gonna be bad and consume a lot of my time." And so, that was kind of how it started, and I've been going strong ever since.

JM: Yeah, I think so. Haha. What do you think, at least for your room, differentiated it from all the other sort of electro, house, dance rooms? What made Wooooo such a success?

DJW: Well, I think it's a combination of things. So, and this might sound crazy to anyone that doesn't have a marketing type of mind, but I think the first and simplest thing was just the name DJ Wooooo. I didn't think about it when I typed it in there. I'm not a real DJ. I don't have a DJ name.

And so, when I typed DJ Wooooo in, I was just typing because when you hear a song you really like and you're in a chat room with a bunch of lunatics, you type, "Woo." And so, that's the reason I typed DJ Wooooo, and it kind of stuck. Originally, I was actually playing in the Coding Soundtrack because that was kind of the popular room. Every time I got up and started playing songs, I had some good picks, and people just started typing "wooooo" incessantly. So yeah, it went from there, and I thought, "Alright, these are coding guys. I'm not a coding guy. They don't like lyrics. I don't mind lyrics at all. And there's gotta be a lot of people like me." So, I thought I'd just start a room, and see how that worked.

JM: Yeah, I know how it is. I was confused at first, too, when I started, but I'm doing fairly okay now.

DJW: Yeah, hah, it takes some time, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy.

JM: Yeah, how long have you been in turntable?

DJW: It's almost four weeks at this point.

JM: And how long did it take you, or what number of points did you get the super user suit?

DJW: The super user avatar really isn't tied to points.

JM: It isn't? Oh.

DJW: No, it's not tied to points at all actually. I had gotten an email from one of the founders, and this is after I had been doing it a while, and obviously I had spent a considerable amount of time on here, and he just emailed me and said, "Thanks for being so supportive of our service. We love what you've been able to do, and we want to ask you to help us a little bit more if you could." So, they kind of made me the full time moderator.

A lot of people ask that question, and I'll be the first to admit, and everybody that's in my room knows this, I'm not in there all day long. I'm in there when I'm in there, and I'll type things out, I'll talk to people when I can, but I've got real work to do like everybody else.

When he had asked me to be a super user, I was all about it because it's a tough service to keep going without people that are interested in making it successful. With the super user thing, I probably get that question 50 times a day. "Where did you get the helmet?" "How do I get that helmet?" And at this point, I don't respond to the questions because I really can't type the same thing over and over. The people that are in the room, that have been there for a while, they answer for me typically. They say, "It's because he's awesome, obviously." Whatever witty response, they can come up with, they'll throw it out there. It's funny to listen to.

DJW: The most original outlandish thing I've heard was that I was dating Sasha Grey. That was like the craziest, craziest thing. I get the "Are you a DJ in real life" thing all the time. I'm not. I think I pride myself in turntable a little bit on just having a sense for what songs will be popular, and I'll be the first to admit again, that I'm not looking to find the most original, crazy track every single time. I'm obviously racking up points, and I'm doing that by picking songs that I know the majority of the room will like. What else have I heard? I work on startups, so there are questions about whether I work for turntable or if I'm an investor. Anything you can really imagine. Nobody knows who I am, so it's pretty funny to listen to the types of scenarios that they've built up for DJ Wooooo. And it's taken on its own persona.

JM: As far as fledgling DJs, in terms of turntable, would you have any nuggets of advice for them to develop their own style?

DJW: You can build a lot on just a few songs that you found that somebody else couldn't. I was lucky enough early on to be able to go and track some stuff down that some friends had done or things that just hadn't been really readily available and throw those things out there. So you can really garner a following just by finding some stuff that really blows people away. And it's out there, too. Everybody's a producer and there's a million tracks out there that are incredible. I don't have the time to find them anymore, but a lot of people do. I think for those people that want to get into turntable and have some fun with it and play some songs and see if they can build a following, that's the best way to start.

The hardest thing is that you can't just go, typically, into a room like DJ Wooooo's and jump on the tables. It's just really hard. It takes a long time. And you've got a lot of people that have special tactics that they use to get up on the DJ booth that give them a little bit of an advantage over everyone else.

JM: Yeah, so, I was wondering, where do you see turntable going? I mean, I know it's only a month, two months old, but do you think this can sustain itself?

DJW: I'm not that familiar with the cost structure. I know that it's expensive because I know that Pandora hasn't yet turned a significant profit, and they've been around forever. At this point, I think it's a big question. It's a totally innovative service with just an unbelievable amount of potential. It's just a matter of whether they can convert it into a profit-producing model. And I think they should be able to.

I think the big difference between Pandora and turntable is that Pandora is one of those "you set up, you let it run, yeah you're going to have to listen to their commercials a bit." With turntable, you are in the room. And depending on whether there's a famous DJ in there throwing down unreleased tracks or it's just a bunch of your friends, you're watching the screen. I think that's an entirely different model than what Pandora has created. I think it's potentially totally sustainable. The music industry is tough on these types of things, and they've proven it over and over again; they're not the most creative folks. They have a hard time; they don't want to lose money on the tracks that they know are valuable. I think it's going to take a little while till we really know, but if anybody can do it, I think these guys have it figured out.

JM: Yeah, they seem to have a good thing going, and now we've got Spotify here, too, in the U.S.

DJW: Yeah, I started playing around with it. It's really hard because I love that I can pick up tracks, search for 'em, and play them on Spotify. But honestly, the turntable human-curation tracks are really much more appealing to me because right now, I've got hundreds of songs that I had never heard before that I now have on my iPhone ready to go every time I jump in my car. I don't know that Spotify's going to do that for me. I think it comes with a number of different sets of functionality that turntable doesn't have, so I think they're in different realms. I can't jump of turntable and start playing music for myself in Spotify. I need to have a crowd!

JM: Oh yeah, of course. It's much more fun that way. Alright, well, thank you for time. This has been fun.

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